In London, I Got Sick. A Bowl of Broth Offered a Different Kind of Healing

On my first morning in London, I wandered, bleary-eyed, through Borough Market as it was just waking up. Vendors fluffed their offerings, the damp air smelling of coffee and stone. Grief had been sharp and loud since Dustin’s memorial a month earlier—impossible to ignore—but here, something softer nudged in. The trip had been planned long before he died—part reunion with Jenny, part escape—and now carried a weight I hadn’t expected. I didn’t yet know that what would matter most wasn’t the change of scenery or the tennis tickets I’d bought impulsively the week he passed. It would be something much smaller—something simmering.

I let the cobblestones and croissants steady me, grounding myself with a dozen oysters and a pint to set things straight. It was the kind of indulgence Dustin would have insisted on, laughing, joining without hesitation. We had met years earlier in a Brooklyn kitchen, both chefs then, and from our first shift together, he swept me into his orbit—endless stories, endless friends, endless life. His absence felt like a blank space I was still learning to live around.

Later that afternoon, Jenny arrived from Oxford, where she was finishing her MA in English Literature. We’d met by chance at a New York bar years back and reconnected slowly—texts, FaceTimes, my weekend visits to Boston. A situationship edging toward something more. With Dustin gone and this trip charged with a new kind of possibility, seeing her step onto the platform felt surreal: grief and anticipation suddenly sitting side by side.

We grabbed a pint just outside the train station and walked a little. Later in the evening, Jenny and I settled into the Airbnb we’d share for the week. Together again, our excitement eased into serenity. I had been worried about how to fill conversation voids, but they never came. Being together again felt calm in a way I hadn’t expected. I didn’t realize then that this trip would become a hinge in my life, folding one chapter closed and another open.

In the morning light, we explored the adorable flat—a spiral staircase, a little gas burner stove, and a fireplace set with kindling and a few logs. Over coffee and pastries, we pieced together outfits we joked were “fancy enough” for Centre Court. A deluge of summer rain hit as we emerged from the Southfields Tube platform. We queued out to the slick streets with one umbrella to happily share.

Inside the closed-roof arena, Wimbledon looked impossibly intimate compared to television—light diffused, strawberries and cream in neat waxed boxes, champagne splits zipped into sleeves of tennis-ball felt. We were early, the stands mostly empty, so I gently asked one of the honorary stewards to let us take a photo on the court level. Our first photo together, both beaming. My eyes were closed; we laughed, took another.

For a few hours, everything felt easy. Rain softened to background noise, the crowd rising and falling in waves of sound, and between serves, Jenny and I kept catching each other’s glances. It felt like we’d stepped into a shared secret: a rare moment suspended between grief and something that might become love.

We came home damp and happy, reveling in the absurdity of being there. We fell into bed, trying to recap every detail, but drowsiness came on hard. As I drifted off, I heard Dustin’s voice in my mind—Dude, that’s so rad. Wimbledon?!—warm, teasing, present.

But some time in the wee hours, the warmth felt wrong. I woke up in twisted, drenched sheets, the air too thick. A fever had arrived hard and fast. I tried to hide it, not wanting to disrupt Jenny, but she was already up. I heard the faucet run, then felt a cool washcloth on my forehead.

By dawn, I was shivering and delirious. The city outside went on without me: double-decker buses sighing, rain steady against the window, voices from the street. When I woke again, the day was spilling through the lace curtains, the light dappled, my vision making it more so. I ached in that way where you can’t tell where it’s coming from, and Jenny was gone. On the nightstand: a tall glass of water, a bright green tube of Berocca (the Emergen-C of the UK), and a note in her handwriting: Gone to get supplies. See you soon. xx Jenny.

Being cared for without being able to reciprocate felt foreign— like a tab I couldn’t settle. Later, I found an actual receipt: De Beauvoir Deli Co., 8:43 a.m.: lemon, ginger, onion, carrot, celery, chicken, sourdough, butter. Everything you need to make a perfect broth.

The rain kept falling. We were supposed to meet an old college friend of mine, but I could barely sit up. I heard the gas stove hissing, the strike of a match, and the poof of a flame before drifting off again. 

By midday, the flat smelled of the rich broth simmering on the stove while Wimbledon players swatted and grunted on television. Jenny moved through the kitchen with quiet purpose. 

“Soup and toast is our version of BRAT Summer,” she said, “Minus the parties, plus electrolytes.” 

“Berocca is so BRAT,” I whispered. 

The warmth took me back to a winter weekend in Boston, when I’d made cabbage soup for us after a visit to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the apartment fogging up until the world outside disappeared. Now, in a borrowed London kitchen, that same quiet filled the room—only she was the one at the stove. 

She handed me a ceramic mug. The broth was clean, bright, and exactly what my body needed. I sipped slowly, realizing she made this without hesitation, without being asked. This was care that arrived unprompted, the kind that stays with you long after an illness passes. 

By the next morning, the fever had broken. Outside, it was bright, the blue vibrating in a cloudless sky. She opened the window. Light filled the space; the sheers danced in the breeze and made the air in the flat feel fresh, the day more optimistic. We drank coffee, half-joking at how quickly everything had shifted: one day had been Centre Court and the next a sickbed.

We walked slowly through the neighborhood, holding hands, pausing to admire bunches of peonies. I felt warmth on my skin, but this time it was from the sun. My strength was returning. I thought a lot about the day before—how she moved instinctively toward care, how it had shifted something in me.

That evening, a reservation miraculously opened at a restaurant called BRAT, a bit of wordplay kismet. The room swirled with woodsmoke and the hiss of meat over coals: a return to normal, but also the start of something newly defined.

On our next leg into the countryside, my energy fully returned. Mornings were slow and quiet, birdsong drifting through the windows. I felt a reconnection to myself and a clearer sense of us, letting myself lean into deeper feelings I’d spent years trying not to need. 

We celebrated my birthday at a pub where we could watch the Wimbledon Final. Between points and bites of roast, I thought of Dustin—no longer with the sharpness of grief but as if he were sitting beside me, shaking his head and laughing. You’re eating roast in the Cotswolds. Happy birthday: You’ve gone full Brit.

I smiled, thinking about how easy it is to mistake the big gestures—vacations, fancy meals— for love. But what stayed with me was the smallest thing: the broth Jenny made without hesitation, without instruction. Her knowing what I needed before I even knew myself.

I’d spent so long conflating independence in relationships with strength. That day stripped the idea down to something smaller and truer: love as the act of letting others in. Love as reciprocity. 

On the flight back to the States, I kept replaying the smallest moments of those two weeks: the broth, the quiet mornings, the steadiness I hadn’t known I was missing. Even then, somewhere over the Atlantic, I could feel that this trip had rearranged something essential in me, in us. 

Dustin threaded through it all—not as an absence anymore, but as a reminder to slow down, to notice what’s right in front of me, to allow people to take care of me, and to return that care without keeping score. To let it all simmer until the flavor makes sense.

A year later, when we wrote our vows, we both mentioned the broth. Not because we needed the metaphor, but because it marked the moment something quiet and true began to take shape between us—long before we ever named it.